Nokia announced on April 15, 2015 that it had agreed to an all-stock deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent valuing ALU at $16.6 billion. The combined company is expected to become the world’s second-largest telecom equipment manufacturer behind Ericsson, with global revenues totaling $27 billion and operations spread across Asia, Europe and North America. Why now? The telecom industry is in the midst of a major transformation both in terms of business models and technology. Virtualization, cloud computing, mobility, and big data analytics are significant technology transformation drivers creating entirely new markets. This is facilitating rapid changes in how communication services are ordered, provisioned, and delivered. Virtualization offers the promise of 10x-100x improvements in cycle time and operational expenses during the Lead-to-Service process interval, and a similar benefit in support for customized and on-demand product packages. It’s about agility – creating a new offer and delivering the service in hours not months. Programmable networks abstract the network intelligence into the software layer and eliminate cumbersome business process that in the past would take 6 – 9 months to complete a service order. Appledore Research Group forecast that NFV and SDN technology spending will reach $72 Billion in 2020. A massive substitution will […]